thoughts on LWN "how many Fedora users are there"

[Joe Smith]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-10-13 at 21:32 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> ...

If I understand Les' idea, a new repo would be added to the standard FC 
install, which would (in the simplest case) point only to one URL, e.g. 
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/$releasever/tracker/RPMS.

There would be no mirrors of this repo, so that the stats are all kept 
in one place.

Everybody who installed that FC release would thereafter by default 
check that repo, on that one URL, every time they updated. The only file 
actually provided by the repo would hold the monthly hit count--a few 
tens of bytes, if it included a comment.

If anyone wants to opt-out, for whatever reason, no matter how spurious, 
all they have to do is disable that repo on the local machine. Period. 
Done. No discussion necessary.

It certainly sounds to me like an idea worth some consideration, if I 
understand what Les is proposing.

Still, if a few hundred zombies can drown a machine with simple pings, 
what about a few hundred thousand FC desktops doing a yum session, even 
a very small one? And on the client end, how robust is yum if one repo 
isn't responding? I haven't noticed a problem recently, but it used to 
be awful: the whole update could be held up by one slow site.

<Joe